you were not invited because the meeting was in Europe and airfare would
have been quite expensive for Debian to pay.

I'm betting you could get from Texas to Spain for around $300 or less.
Debian certainly has the budget for that.

A three-week advance purchase round-trip airfare from Houston to Madrid
is $616 (on Air France or Continental and Iberia) in economy class,
according to Orbitz. (I didn't bother with searching from other
airports in Texas, but I can't imagine the difference would be more than
+/- 10%.)

Further, I'm not sure it's a good use of project funds for jet-setting
developers around the world for meetings when we have things like IRC
and the telephone available. One DebConf and we'd be tapped out...